Matt Vella

Matt Vella

Matt Vella is TIME's assistant managing editor, responsible for business and technology features both in print and online. Before joining TIME, Matt was a senior editor at Fortune magazine. Previously, he worked for Business Week and The Wall Street Journal. He is the winner of a New York Press Club Award for excellence in feature writing and a Webby honoree for original web video. He graduated from Oberlin College in 2003.

This Video Perfectly Captures What It’s Like to Lose Your Mind Over a Video Game

Everybody needs a friend commentating like this

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Ah, Destiny. Bungie’s massively multiplayer shooter inspires great devotion and exasperation in players. But, at it’s best, it can be an addicting, adrenalin-pumping experience. Take the above video—warning it contains some profanity, you may want to wear headphones—the colorful commentary in which was supposedly accidentally recorded by the player’s Playstation 4. Kyle, who was watching a friend play, can be heard egging him on and generally commentating on the increasingly bonkers state of the match in Destiny‘s Crucible multiplayer mode. Everybody needs a pal like Kyle now and then.

Tech Titans in Turmoil

The biggest technology stock-market rally in months was knocked flat July 21, as disappointing earnings rolled in from (almost) all corners. But there was a bright side: the dip seems to reflect a sense among investors that the market is peaking, rather than long-term weaknesses at top companies. …

Here’s When You Can Get Nintendo’s Sweet New Amiibo

The nostalgia factor is very high

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Nintendo has taken the wraps off several special editions of Super Mario Maker, its make-your-own-Mario game slated for released later this year. The company also confirmed the release date for two of its most anticipated Amiibo figurines of its iconic Mario mascot.

The figurines, which connect to various Nintendo digital titles, will come in two variants, the traditional NES Super Mario Bros. in brown and red and referred to as “Classic Colours” and one in current shades dubbed “Modern Colours.” Classic Colours Mario Amiibo will be available as a standalone product September 11 in Europe and September 12 in Australia. The Modern Colours version will be available October 23 in Europe and October 24 in Australia.

A special-edition Nintendo Wii U bundle will pack Mario Maker in with a console. There’s currently no word on U.S. release dates.

Go Ahead and Treat Yourself to 90 Gorgeous Seconds of No Man’s Sky

A new trailer. More wonder

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No Man’s Sky, the massively open space exploration game coming to PC and Playstation 4, is creeping closer to reality. Though an official date hasn’t been announced, more information about the Hello Games-developed title has been made available throughout the month of July. (A big source has been IGN’s great video series; The New Yorker also ran an excellent profile of the studio working on the game.) The title promises to let players explore a vast universe of procedurally generated worlds, discovering new species, mining resources, trading and fighting with one another. And check out our impressions and hopes for No Man’s Sky here.

Watch the Demo That Will Make You Want Virtual Reality Right Now

Mind-blowing, totally mind-blowing

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One of the most talked-about virtual reality products, the Vive developed by games giant Valve and smartphone maker HTC, has been making the rounds with a particularly enticing demonstration: a brand new game in the massively popular Portal universe. Clips of what players see during the experience have cropped up here and there; now, you can watch the entire play through in the video above. In the demo, players find themselves inside a workshop tasked with assembling one of the game’s wisecracking robots, among other tasks. One of the important distinctions of Valve’s VR implementation is its unique controllers, which can be seen being used in this clip.

On July 20, a consortium of scientists funded by billionaire investor Yuri Milner announced a $100 million project to scan the universe for signs of intelligent life. Milner, 53, a prescient technology investor, is also a former physicist. The endeavor, named Breakthrough Listen, is being supported by some of the world’s most well-known scientists and thinkers. As part of the announcement, the group release a letter explaining why the search matters and why it must continue. Here is the document in full.

Are we alone? Now is the time to find out

Who are we?

A mature civilization, like a mature individual, must ask itself this question. Is humanity defined by its divisions, its problems, its passing needs and trends? Or do we have a shared face, turned outward to the Universe?

In 1990, Voyager 1 swiveled its camera and captured the ‘Pale Blue Dot’ – an image of Earth from six billion kilometers away. It was a mirror held up to our planet – home of water, life, and minds. A reminder that we share something precious and rare.

But how rare, exactly? The only life? The only minds?

For the last half-century, small groups of scientists have listened valiantly for signs of life in the vast silence. But for government, academia, and industry, cosmic questions are astronomically far down the list of priorities. And that lengthens the odds of finding answers. It is hard enough to comb the Universe from the edge of the Milky Way; harder still from the edge of the public consciousness.

Yet millions are inspired by these ideas, whether they meet them in science or science fiction. Because the biggest questions of our existence are at stake. Are we the Universe’s only child – our thoughts its only thoughts? Or do we have cosmic siblings – an interstellar family of intelligence? As Arthur C. Clarke said, “In either case the idea is quite staggering.”

That means the search for life is the ultimate ‘win-win’ endeavor. All we have to do is take part.

Today we have search tools far surpassing those of previous generations. Telescopes can pick out planets across thousands of light years. The magic of Moore’s law lets our computers sift data orders of magnitude faster than older mainframes – and ever quicker each year.

These tools are now reaping a harvest of discoveries. In the last few years, astronomers and the Kepler Mission have discovered thousands of planets beyond our solar system. It now appears that most stars host a planetary system. Many of them have a planet similar in size to our own, basking in the ‘habitable zone’ where the temperature permits liquid water. There are likely billions of earth-like worlds in our galaxy alone. And with instruments now or soon available, we have a chance of finding out if any of these planets are true Pale Blue Dots – home to water, life, even minds.

There has never been a better moment for a large-scale international effort to find life in the Universe. As a civilization, we owe it to ourselves to commit time, resources, and passion to this quest.

But as well as a call to action, this is a call to thought. When we find the nearest exo-Earth, should we send a probe? Do we try to make contact with advanced civilizations? Who decides? Individuals, institutions, corporations, or states? Or can we as species – as a planet – think together?

Three years ago, Voyager 1 broke the sun’s embrace and entered interstellar space. The 20th century will be remembered for our travels within the solar system. With cooperation and commitment, the present century will be the time when we graduate to the galactic scale, seek other forms of life, and so know more deeply who we are.

On July 20, a consortium of scientists funded by billionaire investor Yuri Milner announced a $100 million project to answer one of the biggest questions in the universe: Is there intelligent life beyond our solar system? Milner, 53, a former scientist who was CEO of Russia’s largest Internet portal Mail.ru before making prescient investments in Facebook, Twitter and Alibaba, has focused his philanthropic efforts on science. The endowment—dubbed Breakthrough Listen—will fund telescope time in North America and Australia as well as data processing to look for radio signals in distant solar systems. Milner spoke to TIME about the announcements; what follows is a lightly edited transcript.

Q: You founded the Breakthrough Prize three years ago to recognize scientists in much the way the Oscars recognize Hollywood. The show also draws famous celebrity presenters like Benedict Cumberbatch. Why do this? Where does your interest in science come from?
A: In my previous life I was a physicist, maybe that explains my interest in science. I was named Yuri after Yuri Gagarin, the first human to journey into outer space. So I kind of carry this name, and I think, a mission to support science.

We don’t celebrate intellectual achievement. We celebrate athletic achievement. We celebrate artistic achievement. If you were to look at the 200 most famous people in the world, Stephen Hawking wouldn’t make the list—or maybe he’d be number 199 or something. With [Breakthrough], we’re making some progress on that. We don’t pay celebrities to come; they come because they want to. When we started it was the only black tie event in Silicon Valley. This year for the first time, it’ll be broadcast on a major network—Fox—and we’ll be televising it live.

Why focus on the question of life in the universe now?
We’re announcing on July 20, the anniversary of the Apollo Moon landings. I think interest in space is rising again after a long period of dormancy. Look at the excitement over Pluto, over possibly reaching Mars. This project is easy to explain. It’s high impact, low probability which is scientifically legitimate. And everyone in his life has thought about this question.

What are you looking for exactly?
An artificial signal not explainable by science.

SETI [search for extraterrestrial intelligence] has a long history. What’s changed?
In the 1960s, Frank Drake did pioneering SETI work and it was partially funded through the 1980s. But then the idea sort of faded away—except for the question of course. Today several things have changed that will allow us in one day to pull down as much data as we’re currently doing in a year.

We now know for a fact that there are candidates in the galaxy, a few billion. Telescope time used to be harder to get, but now there is an opportunity for private endeavors to buy telescope time. And finally Moore’s Law: we can design a backend infrastructure capable of processing huge amounts of data much faster than ever before. We want to marry the best of Silicon Valley’s capabilities with the best science can offer.

There’s a lot of space, to put it mildly. Even if we get a better look, what’s to say somebody is looking back at us?
There’s been a lot of very serious scientific work done on this and a lot of very interesting philosophical work. The thinking is if there is a civilization even a little more advance than us, they might be able to tell there is oxygen in our atmosphere and that we’re worth looking at. If they have something even as big as Arecibo [a radio telescope in Puerto Rico], and they point it at us they can communicate.

And what about the societal consequences of finding an answer either way?
Either answer is kind of cool and frightening. We’re alone is kind of cool and frightening. And we’re not alone is kind of cool and frightening. Although it would be a fundamental discovery, life will not change a lot. He will got work. I will make an investment. You will write something.

What do you think personally?
The universe is not teeming with life, but we’re probably not alone. If we were alone it would be such a waste of real estate. But I don’t want to be the judge, I just want to help find an answer.

You say this is an “open” project. What does that mean?
We’re making all the data open and available to scientists and amateurs alike. A lot of projects claim to be open but really aren’t. We will be totally open. There will be no need to apply and the data won’t be delivered in a manner so complex as to make it unintelligible. We’re also using the SETI infrastructure—a network of 9 million personal computers that forms one of the largest super computers in the world. Now they’ll have a lot more data to chew on. The more people participate, the better. I’m sure there will be plenty of false positives, but it’s worth it.

The funding will last for a decade. What if we haven’t found anything by then?
I’ll fund it for another 10 years. This thing can go on forever. It’s our responsibility as human beings to keep looking for a signal.

Everything You Need to Know About the Revamped Destiny 2.0

It's the update many players have been calling for from the start

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Destiny‘s next expansion, dubbed The Taken King, is launching on September 15. The popular shooter’s developer Bungie announced July 10 that the game will also be updated to version 2.0, bringing with it significant changes to many of the title’s core mechanics.

Smith specifically addressed quests in the post, saying developers want to provide players with more experiences similar to the exotic bounty chains, in which you are taken “on a journey through multiple activities–which in the best cases had flashes of unique moments and ended with rewards players cared about.”

From Smith’s note:

The implementation of Quests and Bounties in Year One was a foundation, but it was clear to us and the community that it was an area for improvement, especially if we wanted to rely on questing even more in Year Two.

The Taken King was built with Quests in mind, but we didn’t want to ignore the Year One content in this global change. So as a part of this update, we’ve taken all Destiny content and – for lack of a better term – “questified” it.

Other highlights from Smith:

Both Quests and Bounty slots will be tracked in the HUD
Completed Bounties will be turned in from the Quests screen
We’re increasing the number of Bounties players can carry
Reputations will be moved from Inventory to the Quests page

Reddit announced Friday that its interim CEO Ellen Pao would be stepping down from her post. After several months of uproar in the popular message board’s community over policy changes spearheaded by Pao, co-founder Steve Huffman is returning as chief executive. Alexis Ohanian, also a Reddit co-founder who returned last year as executive chairman, is staying on in his role but will move permanently to San Francisco where the firm is headquartered.

Ohanian spoke to TIME exclusively after the announcement. A slightly edited transcript of the conversation follows.

How did this decision finally come about?

This was all a pretty new development. When I first came back eight or nine months ago to the executive chair role, Steve was one of the first people I called. He ruled it out pretty immediately because he was pretty focused on Hipmunk. In the last eight months they’ve been pretty successful and, when we needed him, the stars aligned. Ellen has been great at transitioning and handing the role off.

How much of this move is a response to the turmoil of the last few months?

It’s a pretty special thing when the two founders who have left can come back. All along, the board was focused on finding someone who can excel at community and product. Steve excels at both. That opportunity’s a pretty special one.

Given how much gender has been an issue over the past few months, what do have to say about the fact that you are firing a prominent female CEO?

More than anything else, this is about having someone skilled with product. If you take a look at the record of the company that Steve has at Hipmunk, you’ll see they’ve done extremely well. You’ll see that about half of Hipmunk’s team is women. At Reddit we’re going to hire the best people we can, and I expect many of them to be women.

What is Steve Huffman’s relationship with the community like?

Judging from the responses right now many people are welcoming him back and happy to have him back. I don’t know how much “Huffman hype” there was because I don’t know how many people knew. What matters to me now is getting back to work.

You said Ellen Pao would be staying on in advisory role, what will that entail?

[We want to find] as big an advisory role as we can for her. The big period we’ve had under her has been really formative for Reddit. Her leadership got us through a lot of the changes we made. I hope she’ll continue to be an accurate advisor. It’ll be a pretty traditional advisory role.

Is you role changing?

As executive chair, I was between San Francisco and New York. Now as chairman, I’m working in California full time. I hate giving up the pizza but this is one of those opportunities.

Many of the issues over the past months have been community issues. How is bringing in a product person going to fix that?

Reddit is a platform for communities. Our users have created something that effectively sets the agenda. We need to do a better job from a product standpoint. That was at the core of last week. For years we’d been talking about making changes to improve basic tools and not doing anything. It’s just something we haven’t been doing. Having someone like Steve helps us tremendously ship great products.

How will you and Steve Huffman work together?

Steve is the person I was closest to for almost a decade. For the last few years, he’s been largely out of my life. It wasn’t until recently that we came back into each other’s lives. It was a friendship that mattered a lot to me. We reconnected over the past few months. I feel all warm on the inside and I’m grateful for that.

Reddit CEO Ellen Pao Is Stepping Down

Beck Diefenbach—ReutersEllen Pao speaking to the media after losing her high profile gender discrimination lawsuit against venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers in San Francisco, on March 27, 2015.

Amid ongoing crisis, the embattled community site is reshuffling its executives

Reddit’s interim CEO Ellen Pao is stepping down, Reddit investor and Y Combinator President Sam Altman announced in a Friday post on the site. Pao will be replaced by Steve Huffman, a Reddit co-founder and its first CEO.

Reddit, the popular online message board founded a decade ago, has been in turmoil since July 2 when many of its moderators—who largely work for free painting the site’s more than 9,000 discussion threads—began shutting down some of the most trafficked parts of the site. They were protesting the surprise dismissal of a popular employee, Victoria Taylor, Reddit’s director of talent and a facilitator of the Ask Me Anything feature.

Ultimately, Pao apologized. “We handled the transition in a way that caused some disruption,” she said at the time, “and we should have done a better job.” But her apology seemed not to appease many users. Writing in a July 8 New York Times op-ed, Brian Lynch and Courtnie Swearingen, two Reddit moderators, argued that “Ms. Taylor’s sudden termination is just the most recent example of management’s making changes without thinking through what those changes might mean for the people who use the site on a daily basis.” Though the site returned to normalcy, the chorus of users calling for Pao’s firing continued.

Pao, 45, is likely most well-known for her unsuccessful gender-discrimination lawsuit against venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In late June, she told TIME the company’s board had given her a year to make her mark and that she hoped to stay on longer. Pao, who will serve as an advisor to Reddit’s board through the end of this year, could not be reached for comment.

Pao’s tenure came during a rocky period for Reddit. She was installed as interim CEO in late-2014 after the company’s previous chief, Yishan Wong, left abruptly in the wake of a hacking scandal in which Reddit became a hub for distributing illicit photos stolen from celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton. (He said he resigned over a dispute with the board about where to headquarter the company.) Ohanian, who left the company in 2009, was called back in as chairman. Altman’s Friday post says Ohanian will now have the title of “cofounder.”

In May, when Pao and co-founder Ohanian began more closely policing some of the content on Reddit that was bullying or offensive, moderators also became upset. Retaliatory threads comparing Pao to Hitler and calling for her resignation quickly shot to the front of the site’s home page. “It’s the Internet,” Pao told TIME of the personal attacks in a recent profile, “and something I’ve been dealing with for a year. I just ignore it.”

The leadership changes come as Reddit tries to find its balance in order to expand. Reddit is the 10th most trafficked website in the U.S., eclipsing Netflix, Pinterest and the New York Times, according to Internet tracker Alexa. Its 164 million users generated more than 7 billion page views in June. Once a unit of Advance Publications, parent company of the Conde Nast magazine empire, it was spun off in 2011 and late last year raised funds reportedly valuing it at $500 million.

Here’s Altman’s post in full:

Ellen Pao resigned from reddit today by mutual agreement. I’m delighted to announce that Steve Huffman, founder and the original reddit CEO, is returning as CEO.

We are thankful for Ellen’s many contributions to reddit and the technology industry generally. She brought focus to chaos, recruited a world-class team of executives, and drove growth. She brought a face to reddit that changed perceptions, and is a pioneer for women in the tech industry. She will remain as an advisor to the board through the end of 2015. I look forward to seeing the great things she does beyond that.

We’re very happy to have Steve back. Product and community are the two legs of reddit, and the board was very focused on finding a candidate who excels at both (truthfully, community is harder), which Steve does. He has the added bonus of being a founder with ten years of reddit history in his head. Steve is rejoining Alexis, who will work alongside Steve with the new title of “cofounder”.

A few other points. Mods, you are what makes reddit great. The reddit team, now with Steve, wants to do more for you. You deserve better moderation tools and better communication from the admins.

Second, redditors, you deserve clarity about what the content policy of reddit is going to be. The team will create guidelines to both preserve the integrity of reddit and to maintain reddit as the place where the most open and honest conversations with the entire world can happen.

Third, as a redditor, I’m particularly happy that Steve is so passionate about mobile. I’m very excited to use reddit more on my phone.

As a closing note, it was sickening to see some of the things redditors wrote about Ellen. [1] The reduction in compassion that happens when we’re all behind computer screens is not good for the world. People are still people even if there is Internet between you.

If the reddit community cannot learn to balance authenticity and compassion, it may be a great website but it will never be a truly great community. Steve’s great challenge as CEO [2] will be continuing the work Ellen started to drive this forward.

[1] Disagreements are fine. Death threats are not, are not covered under free speech, and will continue to get offending users banned.

Ellen asked me to point out that the sweeping majority of redditors didn’t do this, and many were incredibly supportive. Although the incredible power of the Internet is the amplification of voices, unfortunately sometimes those voices are hateful.

[2] We were planning to run a CEO search here and talked about how Steve (who we assumed was unavailable) was the benchmark candidate—he has exactly the combination of talent and vision we were looking for. To our delight, it turned out our hypothetical benchmark candidate is the one actually taking the job.

And here’s Pao’s departure post in full:

After more than two years at reddit, I have resigned today. My first day was April 1, 2013 (go orangered[1] !), and every day since has been an adventure.

In my eight months as reddit’s CEO, I’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly on reddit. The good has been off-the-wall inspiring, and the ugly made me doubt humanity.

I just want to remind everyone that I am just another human; I have a family, and I have feelings. Everyone attacked on reddit is just another person like you and me. When people make something up to attack me or someone else, it spreads, and we eventually will see it. And we will feel bad, not just about what was said. Also because it undercuts the authenticity of reddit and shakes our faith in humanity.

What has far outshone the hate has been the positive on reddit. Thank you, kind strangers, for expressing your support. You gilded me 100 times. (For those of you who apologized for generating a wave of accusations that I gilded myself, please don’t feel bad. You did a good thing.) And thank you for sending cute animal pics and encouraging me to “Stay safe!” when the site overheated with expressions of hate in various forms. There were some days when your PMs inspired me more than you can imagine.

Most touching were the stories from regular users. Some told of people they knew who had committed suicide for being transgender or exposed in revenge porn. Others shared their experiences of being harassed and expressed empathy and gratitude. More recently, several users apologized for trolling me and for not giving me the benefit of the doubt when the troll hivemind moved against me. Initially users said they were afraid to post supportive messages openly; recently they started fighting back against the trolls publicly on reddit with support, corrections and positive messages.

So why am I leaving? Ultimately, the board asked me to demonstrate higher user growth in the next six months than I believe I can deliver while maintaining reddit’s core principles.

You will be in good hands — our strong leadership team will now be led by u/spez[2] , one of reddit’s original co-founders. Like u/kn0thing[3] , he’s lived and breathed reddit since its inception and will work passionately to ensure reddit’s success.

Thank you to all the users who shared your excitement about reddit and what we’ve done and for encouraging everyone to remember the human. And thank you for making my time here at reddit an amazing learning experience.